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Cross's crew. If any of them talks to you, you aren't to understand them. Is that clear?"

"Isn't that carrying things just a little far?" Hariman asked with a frown.

"The Qasmans had ample opportunity to study Anglic the last time we were here,"

Jin put in quietly. "Some of them were even able to force-learn it well enough to speak it. If they suspect us, they might throw one of those people at us."

"Right," Barynson nodded, looking impressed despite himself. "The old trick of getting a spy to speak in his native language. I'd just as soon none of us falls for it."

"We understand," Sun said in Qasaman. "We demon warriors, at least, won't fall for it."

"I hope not." Barynson looked him straight in the eye. "Because if you ever do, you'll probably wind up earning your pay the hard way."

Qasama was a dark mass against the stars, a fuzzy new-moon sliver of light at one edge showing the dawn line, as the shuttle fell free of the Southern Cross and began its leisurely drift toward the world below. Gazing down through the tiny porthole to her left, Jin licked dry lips and tried to quiet her thudding heart. Almost there, she told herself. Almost there. Her first mission as a

Cobra-a goal she'd dreamed about and fantasized about for probably half her life. And now, with it almost close enough to taste, she could feel nothing but quiet terror.

So much, she thought half bitterly, for the heroic Cobra warrior.

"You ever fly before this trip?" Sun, sitting on the aisle seat next to her, asked quietly.

"Aircraft, sure, but never any spacecraft," Jin told him, thankfully turning her attention away from the porthole. "Hardly ever into enemy territory, either."

He chuckled, a sound that almost masked the nervousness she could see around his eyes. "We'll do fine," he assured her. "Parades and canonization, remember?"

A smile broke of its own accord through her tension. "Sure." Reaching across the armrest, she took his hand. It was almost as cold as her own.

"Hitting atmosphere," she heard the pilot say from the red-lit cockpit at the front of the passenger compartment. "Injection angle... right on the mark."

Jin gritted her teeth. She understood all the reasons behind coming in as far as they could on an unpowered glide approach-the light from a ship's gravity lifts was extremely visible, especially against a night sky-but the eerie silence from the engines wasn't helping her nervousness a bit. Looking back out the porthole, she tried not to imagine the planet rushing up to hit them-

"Uh-oh," the pilot muttered.

"What?" Barynson snapped from the seat beside him.

"A radar scan just went over us."

Jin's mouth went a little drier, and Sun's grip on her hand tightened. "But they can't pick us up, can they?" Barynson asked. "The Trofts told us-"

"No, no, we're okay," the pilot assured him. "I was just surprised they're scanning this far from the Fertile Crescent, that's all."

"They're paranoid," Layn muttered from the seat across the narrow aisle from

Sun. "So what else is new?"

But they aren't supposed to be that way any more, Jin thought morosely. They were supposed to lose that when we got the mojos off their shoulders. That had been the whole point of seeding the planet with Aventinian spine leopards thirty years ago, after all. If it hadn't worked-

She shook her head to clear it. If it hadn't worked, they would find out soon enough. There wasn't any point in worrying about it until then.

"Parades and canonization," Sun murmured, misreading her thoughts. It helped, anyway, and she threw him a grateful smile.

The minutes dragged on. An oddly distant scream of air against the shuttle's hull increased and then faded, and slowly all but the brightest of the stars overhead began to be swallowed up by the thickening atmosphere around them.

Straining upward against her restraints, Jin could make out the gross details of the ground beneath them now, and in the distance the horizon had lost all of its curve. Five minutes, she estimated-ten at the most-and they would be down.

Setting her nanocomputer's clock circuit, she leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, took a deep breath-

And through the closed lids she still saw the right-hand side of the passenger compartment abruptly blaze up like a fireball, and a smashing wall of thunder slammed her against her seat and into total blackness.

Chapter 11

The pain came first. Not localized pain, not even particularly bad at first; more like a vague and unpleasant realization that somewhere in the darkness something was hurting. Hurting a lot...

A large part of her didn't care. The blackness was quiet and uncomplicated, and it would have been pleasant to stay hidden there forever. But the pain was a continual nagging at the roots of the nothingness, and even as she was forced to accept and notice its existence she found herself being forced slowly up out of the blackness. Grudgingly, resentfully, she passed through the black, to a dark gray, to a lighter gray-

And with a gasp as the pain suddenly sharpened and focused itself into arms, chest, and knee, she came fully awake.

She was in an awkward and thoroughly uncomfortable position, half-sitting and half-lying on her left side, the safety harness digging painfully into her chest and upper thighs. Blinking the wetness-blood? she wondered vaguely-from her eyes, she looked around the tilted and darkened interior of the shuttle. Nothing could be seen clearly; only after several seconds of straining her eyes did it occur to her befuddled mind to key in her optical enhancers.

The sight made her gasp.

The shuttle was a disaster area. Across the aisle the far hull had been literally blown in, leaving a ragged-edged hole a meter or more across. Strands of twisted and blackened metal curled inward from the gap like frozen ribbons; bits and pieces of plastic, cloth, and glass littered everything she could see.

The twin seats that had been by the hole had been ripped from their bracings and were nowhere to be seen.

The twin seats that Layn and Raines had been sitting in.

Oh, God. For a moment Jin gazed in horror at the ruined struts where the seats had been. They were gone, gone totally from the shuttle... from thirty or forty kilometers up.

Somewhere, someone groaned. "Peter?" she croaked. Todor and Hariman had been in the seats just behind the missing men... "Peter?" she tried again. "Rafe?"

There was no answer. Reaching up with a hand that was streaked with blood, she groped for her safety harness release. It was jammed; gritting her teeth, she put servo-motor strength into her squeeze and got it free. Shakily, she climbed to her feet, stumbling off-balance on the canted floor. She grabbed onto what was left of her seat's emergency crashbag to steady herself, jamming her left knee against the bulkhead in the process. A dazzling burst of pain stabbed through the joint, jolting her further out of her fogginess. Shaking her head-sparking more pain-she raised her eyes to look over the seat back to where

Todor and Hariman should be.

It was only then that she saw what had happened to Sun.

She gasped, her stomach suddenly wanting to be sick. The explosion had apparently sent shrapnel into his crashbag, tearing through the tough plastic and leaving him defenseless against the impact of the shuttle's final crash.

Still strapped to his seat, blood staining his landing coveralls where the harness had dug into his skin, his head lolled against his chest at an impossible angle.

He was very clearly dead.

Jin stared at him for a long minute. This isn't real, she told herself wildly, striving to believe it. If she believed it hard enough, maybe it wouldn't have happened... This isn't real. This is our first mission-just our first mission.

This can't happen. Not now. Oh, God, please not now.

The scene began to swim before her eyes, and as it did so a red border appeared superimposed across her optically enhanced vision. The sensors built into her